Maureen Dowd: Hope we are at end of talking about the end

It never comes, for instance, when you're sitting in front of a blank computer screen trying to think of a column.

But the end is nigh, according to ancient Mayas and Washington mandarins.

We have reached the quivering moment of truth that Jon Stewart calls "Cliffpocalypsemageddonacaust."

However the Mayan prediction and the fiscal cliff work out in the next few days, I hope we are talking about the end of talking about the end.

It's tedious to always be suspended in midair, like Wile E. Coyote or Thelma and Louise. The attempts by some to continually whirl the whole American population into a state of apocalyptic excitement are exhausting.

There's a new American trend in hysteria. Everything now is in italics, punctuated by exclamation points!!! As entertaining as Carrie Mathison's bouts of hysteria have been in "Homeland," stirring up hysteria in real life, whether to draw clicks, eyeballs or votes, is not a good idea.

Cliff dwellers in our society may think that facing the guillotine focuses the mind. But the cliff metaphor is so overused it makes me want to walk off one.

If your Christmas presents don't come from Amazon in time, you're going over the gift cliff. If your boyfriend bails, you're going over the romance cliff. If he comes back, you could be going over the marriage cliff.

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Journalists now have to add an extra coup de grace ("Fiscal cliff crash") or double metaphor ("Clock is ticking for fiscal cliff") or raffish cartoons to juice things up. The new cover of The Economist features Uncle Sam, waving a Jack Daniels bottle, with the Statue of Liberty, wearing cool shades and smoking a doobie, plunging into the Grand Canyon in a red, white and blue Thunderbird with the license plate "Debt 1."

But scaring people is generally not a good way to get people to understand things. It's like the color-coded warnings for terrorist attacks that lost all meaning amid the fear mongering.

Especially in emergencies, grave crises like a nuclear threat or a terrorist attack, you need calm people who don't think the world is going to end.

Lincoln wasn't cliffy. As the new Steven Spielberg movie shows, Lincoln had a goal and pursued it methodically through various means, some shady. He wasn't interested in hysteria. It had no political use for him.

The BBC examined the etymology of the phrase of the moment. The lexicographer Ben Zimmer discovered that an 1893 editorial in The Chicago Tribune warned: "The free silver shriekers are striving to tumble the United States over the same fiscal precipice."

Zimmer traced the first use of "fiscal cliff" to the property section of The New York Times in 1957, in an article about people overextending their finances to buy their first home. Ben Bernanke imprinted the term on the public consciousness last February, pointing ominously toward Jan. 1.

But Derek Thompson, the business editor at The Atlantic, told the BBC that if you had to go topographical, a slope or a hill was more accurate.

"You talk about a cliff, it's extremely sudden and the second you step off the edge you plunge to your death," he said, adding: "We're not going to fall off anything."

Language is important, he said, because it can provoke a panicky deal rather than a smart deal.

"There will be a short, sharp recession in early to middle of next year, which is more like falling on your face after fasting too vigorously, and then the economy is going to grow," he said.

The really bad news is that, even if we survive this abyss, there are more coming, with the debt ceiling cliff and the spending bill cliff dead ahead. Once you start with the cliffs, you can fall into cliffinity -- with endless cliff riffs on the horizon.